Ours As We Play It: Australia plays Shakespeare

Kate Flaherty

By closely examining Shakespeare’s plays as they’ve never been studied before – performed by Australian theatre companies in contemporary Australia – Kate Flaherty, argues that Shakespeare’s plays cannot help but resonate with local concerns.

Flaherty analyses several contemporary Australian productions of three Shakespeare plays; exploring masculinity and madness in Hamlet, the role of landscape and the multiple roles of Rosalind in As You Like It, and hierarchies of gender and social order re-imagined in relation to Australian understandings of power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ours as We Play It draws together a wealth of primary resources from theatre archives and rehearsal rooms, including images, reviews, and interviews with practitioners, to compose a picture of Shakespeare’s plays as they are performed in the Australian context.

Praise for Ours As We Play It:

[Flaherty] richly evokes the theatrical event that so vexes scholars of the ephemeral and for this the book is a worthy addition to Australian theatre history.

ROB CONKIE, THE AGE

 

In her excellent book, Kate Flaherty offers insightful explanations for curious theatrical trends [in Australia]. And because there is so little scholarship on contemporary Australian productions of Shakespeare, every page is fresh and exciting…Required reading for theatre nuts.

CLAIRE WILLIAMS, THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: 2011
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 240 pages
SIZE: 235 x 155 mm
ISBN: 9781742582627
RIGHTS: World
CATEGORY: Art, Photography and Design, Kate Flaherty, UWAP Scholarly,